Katharine's 52 Week Illustration Challenge

There is a wonderful creative community on facebook - 52 Week Illustration Challenge. It's called a challenge, because we each challenge ourselves to produce an illustration every week following a prompt set by the group's admin. I think of it as a community because there is a huge amount of support and encouragement amongst its members to have faith in our work and to grow as artists. (There I said it, 'artist'!)

Monday, 2 May 2016

My children's grandmother hasn't read the rules.This is a memory I have, from years ago, of my mum racing up a tree as soon as we arrived at her new house. My children weren't as keen as she was, she'd clearly been waiting for an excuse for weeksI have a photo somewhere, but I can't find it. This will become the only record of the event :)Drawn using wacom tablet in photoshop

Like a butterfly collector but more animal friendly, influenced by The Sound Collector (Roger McGough), and turning out more like a smaller version of the BFGMy collector is making the world a happier place by collecting positive things and getting ready to share them

This week I created a new pattern. I doodled a host of frame ideas, on my A5 sketchbook, with the idea that I would tidy them up and straighten them. In the end I only rearranged them and added a tad of colour

and copied a street-photo from 1941 of children playing with a broken mirror. I didn't go searching for this, I happened across it in a magazine - a bit of serendipity :)

I started with the pink pen - because that's all I had to hand, and added the black for definition later.

Saturday, 16 April 2016

I had so many ideas and so much stage fright this week.
I've bottled out of some of my more ambitious ideas and kept it relatively simple, and to a theme.
I love the light coming through the water and onto the ocean floor - so here's a literal interpretation and a repeating pattern developed from my tutorial which I wrote a few weeks ago.

Acrylic on paper, A3

Shells drawn on paper with a finelinerPattern created in photoshop, then coloured.Ripples added as an extra layer.

Sunday, 27 March 2016

I thought of clock movements, animals and birds moving, migration - I started off with some experiments with static/movement illusion. I experimented on paper first but found it is much more effective when done digitally. So many of my ideas didn't make it to fruition, but I had another fresh idea - my second posting was based on banners you see at rallies: political movements.

I wanted a meadow with lots of butterflies fluttering by. If you scroll up and down you should see them move :)

This was drawn by hand, scanned in and coloured digitally. I wanted it to be a repeated pattern, but for some reason it just didn't work.However I am very happy as it was chosen as one of the pics on the challenge page this week :)

This kind of prompt is tricky because you could draw anything - so many choices means it's hard to see the wood for the trees. I chose the first one from a recent photo I took and the second was just playing with scribbly, doodly flowers. It was so hard not to grab the pen with my right hand when my left hand just didn't want to go where I wanted it too.(To be completely honest, I also tried a self -portrait or two - but they were truly awful).